Secrets of the Looking Glass Page 2

  A sick heat rose from my stomach to my throat as I realized I’d lost the game and the tournament.

  Dazed, I got up and shook her hand.

  The judges gave Jessica a first-place trophy and handed me a paper certificate for second place.

  “Nice try,” said Quan, the second-best player on the team.

  Another player, Celesta, patted my back. “Better luck next time.”

  “I really thought you had me,” Jessica said. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I muttered. But I did know. The first rule of chess was to never take your focus off the game, and yet that’s exactly what I’d done.

  Sinking my teeth into the side of my cheek for the first time in weeks, I grabbed my things and hurried out into the hallway. Behind me, I heard a door slam and the sound of running footsteps.

  “Celia,” Tyrus called. “Wait up.”

  I didn’t want to talk to anyone, least of all him. But he grabbed my arm, his mouth twisted like he’d eaten the cafeteria’s disgusting meat loaf. “The new girl, Deanne, was here.”

  “I noticed,” I said, glaring at him.

  His pained expression didn’t change. “She said we’re different from everyone else at the school.”

  Different? I’d lost my first-ever chess tournament because some girl was busy telling Tyrus he and I were different?

  “You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that out,” I snapped.

  He licked his lips. “Not different like weird. Different like unusual. She asked about the book I gave you in class. Then she wanted to know if the two of us had ever traveled anywhere ‘out of the ordinary.’”

  Whatever he was all worked up about, I didn’t get it. Pulling my arm from his grip, I turned and nearly collided with the girl we’d just been discussing.

  “I watched you play,” Deanne said.

  How had she gotten past us? I would have seen her if she’d come through the hall, and the only other door to the room where we’d been playing chess opened into the school’s back parking lot. Even if she’d run the whole way around the building, she shouldn’t have been able to get there so fast.

  Her blue eyes met mine, and for a moment, I could have sworn they glowed. “You’re very talented.”

  I looked away. “Not talented enough.”

  Tyrus blinked. “You won, didn’t you? I was watching the game until—”

  “She would have won,” Deanne interrupted, “in twenty moves at most, if she’d played her own game.”

  “What do you know?” I demanded. “Have you ever played chess?”

  Deanne laughed. The papers on the bulletin board across from us rattled, one of them ripping free of its staples and flying down the hall. “I have some experience. Her earlier opponents feared her. You didn’t, but you still let her set the rules.”

  She circled around, studying me with an unsettling intensity as I tried to think of a response. “I could teach you how to fix that, Celia. You have determination, ambition, a killer instinct. With the proper motivation, your strategy and cunning would make you an excellent battle commander.”

  She tapped Tyrus’s chest. “Your imagination and vocabulary would slay foes by the hundreds.”

  “I don’t p-play chess,” Tyrus stammered.

  “Chess is a game,” Deanne said. “What I have in mind for the two of you has much higher stakes.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, trying to elbow past her. She was about my same size but pushing against her felt like running into a boulder.

  “You will.” With a quick spin, she twirled around me. By the time I turned to ask what she meant, she was somehow all the way at the other end of the hall. Tossing her blonde hair over her shoulder, she looked back and called out, “I believe the two of you will make . . .”

  Chapter 3

  Powerful Combisaries

  “What are we going to do?” Tyrus asked as we trudged home. “Should we tell someone?”

  It had been raining off and on all day. Now, with the sun setting, the wet gray sidewalks and bleak sky matched my mood. Head down, shoulders slumped, I wanted to lock myself in my room and pretend the day had never happened. But Tyrus kept circling me, splashing through puddles like an anxious puppy.

  “How did she get here? What does she want?”

  “What does who want?” I muttered.

  Tyrus stared at me like I’d grown a third arm. “Deanne, of course.”

  She was the last person I wanted to talk about. I hefted my backpack higher on my shoulders and hurried toward home.

  “Wait,” he called, running to catch up.

  “Leave me alone.” I crossed the street, barely looking where I was going, and stepped in a pothole. Icy brown water soaked through my shoe and sock, but I didn’t care. I thought Tyrus had come to the chess tournament because he was my friend. But friends were supposed to support each other, not obsess about some stupid new girl.

  “Don’t you even want to know what she’s doing here?” Tyrus asked. “How she found us?”

  “No.” I turned and kicked a rock across the street. “If you care so much about it, go ask her.”

  Tyrus froze, his backpack hanging lopsided by a loose strap. “Are you mad at me? Did I do something?”

  “Yes!” My temper spiked then disappeared when I saw the look of real concern on his face. “No. I mean, not really. It’s just . . .” Unsure of what I wanted to say or how to say it, I stared at a spot of rainbow-colored oil on the street.

  “It’s the chess match, isn’t it?” Tyrus asked quietly. “I’m sorry I got distracted at the end.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. “It’s not your fault.” Anger, embarrassment, guilt, and a bunch of other emotions I was terrible at expressing swirled greasily inside me like the oil at my feet. “After so many years of feeling useless, I really wanted to be good at something.”

  “Are you kidding? You’re smart, funny, nice, and amazingly good at math.”

  I shoved my hands in my pockets. “No one cheers when you solve an algebra problem. But when I’m playing chess, the whole team is watching me and rooting for me to win. And I would have too, if I’d only noticed Jessica was moving her pawn to—”

  “Promote it to a queen?” Tyrus finished.

  I stared at him.

  “Did I say it wrong?” he asked. “Was that not what she—”

  “No. You said it exactly right, and that is how she beat me. But how do you know about promoting a pawn?”

  “Uh, I probably heard you mention it before.” Tyrus shuffled his feet. “After Wonderland, we promised we’d be there for each other at school this year. I wasn’t there for you at the end of the game, and I’m sorry.”

  I smiled, feeling happy and weepy at the same time. “Thank you. I’ll come to your book club tomorrow. Even if you are reading Inkheart just to trick me into digging up the diaries.”

  “Oh my gosh!” Tyrus pulled off his glasses. “That’s why she’s here. Deanne wants the diaries. We have to check on them.”

  He turned toward my house, but I grabbed his pack. “What would some girl we’ve never met until today want with the diaries? How would she even know about them?”

  “Weren’t you listening to anything I’ve been saying?”

  I shrugged, my face growing warm. “Sorry.”

  Tyrus took a deep breath before blurting, “The new girl is from Wonderland.”

  I waited for the rest of the joke. “How did you come up with that?”

  Tyrus held up a finger. “First, there’s her accent.”

  “She said she’s from Austria.”

  “She could be lying.” He raised a second finger. “She sat right next to us in class, and at the tournament she said the two of us are different.”

  I couldn’t
help smiling again. “Um, we are different, remember? Fish in roller skates?” It was a joke we’d made about us being outcasts the first day we met.

  Tyrus raised a third finger. “She asked if we had traveled anywhere ‘out of the ordinary’ recently.”

  “Which could mean Bellybutton, Maine, for all we know.”

  He paused. “Is there really a Bellybutton, Maine?”

  I giggled. “I doubt it.”

  “Here’s the big one.” He raised his fourth finger. “The last thing she said to us was that we would make excellent combisaries.”

  “I don’t think that’s a real word,” I said.

  “Not here it isn’t.” Tyrus looked at me as though waiting for that to sink in. “But Wonderland is full of portmanteau words.”

  “Port what?”

  “Portmanteau. Originally, it meant a two-part suitcase, but Charles Dodgson used it to describe when two ordinary words are combined to form a new and different word. His books are full of them. Chortle comes from ‘chuckle’ and ‘snort.’ Galumph comes from ‘gallop’ and ‘triumphant.’ Everyone thought he made them up. Except, we know where he really got them.”

  I rubbed my forehead, feeling like I was falling through the tunnel again that had dropped us into the Arithma Sea. “Like, how in Wonderland, they called the monster made out of smoke and words a hauntstrosity.”

  “From ‘haunt’ and ‘monstrosity’—yes,” Tyrus said. “Combi­saries has to be a portmanteau created by combining ‘­combatant’—someone who fights—and ‘adversaries’—­opponents in a contest or battle.”

  Could he be right? We’d never seen Deanne in Wonder­land, but we’d only explored a small part of it. “And portmanteau words only come from there?”

  Tyrus scratched the back of his neck. “Not only. We have them here too. Vitamin comes from ‘vita’ and ‘amine.’ SPAM is from ‘spiced ham.’ And chillax is from ‘chill’ and ‘relax.’”

  “Then we don’t know for sure that she’s from Wonder­land,” I said, feeling a little better. “Combisaries could be an Austrian thing.”

  “I guess.” Tyrus chewed his lower lip. “I’d still feel better if we checked on the diaries.”

  I didn’t believe the new girl was from Wonderland. But she had acted strangely, and her running into us twice in one day didn’t feel like an accident. So I was more than a little relieved when we reached my backyard and saw that the diaries’ hiding place looked the same as it always had.

  Tyrus got down on his hands and knees, turning his head. “I think I see some bent blades of grass.”

  “Get up,” I said. “You’re all wet. Plus, you’re in the wrong location.” I tapped a spot to his left. “We buried them here.”

  “Are you sure?” Tyrus crawled forward and ran his hand across the ground.

  “Positive.” For the first few weeks after school started, I’d been able to notice a slight difference in the level of the yard where we’d buried the diaries. Now, I could only tell because the spot was directly across from a warped board in the fence.

  “I think we should dig them up anyway,” Tyrus said. “Just until we’re sure you-know-who isn’t from you-know-where.”

  “They’re safest where they are.” I pulled him to his feet. “Let’s go inside and eat.”

  We continued to discuss Deanne over a plate of microwaved mini corn dogs, but by the time Tyrus left, the only plan we’d come up with was to watch her closely until we figured out what she was up to.

  Later that night, Mom went into her office to work on some papers. I climbed into bed with my copy of Inkheart, hoping to make it through the first chapter before book club.

  As usual, reading something unfamiliar was slow going, and I needed to use my reading pen to scan several words I didn’t know. I tried to focus on the story, but my mind kept replaying what Deanne had said in the hallway. What had she meant by saying I would be an excellent battle commander? And how would Tyrus’s vocabulary slay foes? Were they expressions from her country or something more?

  After a while, I put the book down and pulled my blankets around my shoulders. Lightning began to flash outside my curtain, and thunder jolted the night air. Rolling my pillow into a ball, I scrunched my head into its soft surface and let the gentle sounds of my mom working lull me to sleep. I barely noticed when the wind began shaking the tree branches outside and the neighbor’s dogs started to bark. I closed my eyes and had . . .

  Chapter 4

  The Strangest Dream

  “Celia, get up. You’re going to be late for school.”

  Mom’s voice jerked me awake, and I rubbed my eyes to see that I’d overslept.

  Washing my face and pulling a brush through my hair, I remembered dreaming that someone had been sneaking around behind my house. I’d looked out the window to find the backyard changed into a chessboard. All the pieces were mini corn dogs except for the enemy queen who was a hideous creature with cold blue eyes and sharp teeth. The monster chased me around the yard, trying to put me in check.

  I don’t usually remember my dreams, but this one was so vivid I could almost feel the steam on my neck as it billowed from the queen’s mouth.

  I grabbed my schoolbooks from the kitchen table as Mom handed me a Pop-Tart and kissed me on the cheek. “Have a great day!”

  It was the same thing she’d called out to me every morning since kindergarten, but this was the first year I could remember when, more often than not, I did have a great day. I had Tyrus’s friendship to thank for that, but, also, the newfound confidence I’d gained from Hatter, Cheshire, Kat the butterfly, and several of the other creatures we’d met in Wonderland.

  Large raindrops splatted against my face as I stepped out the front door. Pulling up the hood of my jacket, I noticed someone had spray-painted graffiti in bright green paint on the streetlight in front of our house. At a gas station a few blocks away, I noticed more of the green graffiti on the white brick wall.

  I couldn’t imagine anyone willing to brave a downpour just to spray-paint a few letters and symbols in random spots around the city. But maybe they couldn’t imagine someone wanting to sit at a table for hours moving chess pieces around a board.

  As I waited at an intersection, I spotted a question mark painted on a stop sign in the same bright green as the other markings. Hoping none of the drivers would assume stopping was now optional, I looked both ways and raced through the crosswalk.

  It wasn’t until I got to school and spotted the groundskeeper, Mr. Cebrowski, scrubbing two green question marks off a No Parking sign that something clicked in my head.

  Before I could complete the thought, Tyrus ran out to meet me.

  “Celia,” he gasped, water dripping down his face. “I figured it out.”

  “Figured what out?” I asked, trying to remember what the question marks reminded me of.

  Tyrus took a deep breath. “Deanne isn’t from Wonderland.”

  I wanted to laugh that Tyrus was still worried about that, but part of me felt relieved. “How do you know?”

  Mr. Cebrowski scowled at us from under the hood of his yellow raincoat. “You two didn’t see who defaced school property, did you?”

  “No, sorry.” I grabbed Tyrus’s hand. “Let’s get out of the rain. We’ll be late for school.”

  “I’m not going,” Tyrus said, wiping water off his forehead.

  I looked at him more closely. “Are you sick?”

  “I feel sick. You will too when I tell you what I discovered.” He looked around before pulling me behind a school bus. “I figured it out late last night. It wouldn’t have taken me so long, but I’d assumed she spelled her name with an e.”

  The rain had soaked my jeans, and I’d already received one tardy slip for the semester, but Tyrus was clearly upset. “Slow down and start over.”

  He inhaled and exhaled twice
before speaking. “Remember when Deanne said that thing about names having meanings?”

  “Yeah. Something about a person’s name letting you see inside them.”

  “Right.” Tyrus pulled a notebook from his pocket, covering it with part of his jacket to keep it dry as he flipped through the pages. “I thought she was talking to Mr. Sheehy, but what if she meant it for us?”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, a chill tracing my neck.

  “I was thinking about names last night,” Tyrus said, sounding more like himself. “And before Charles Dodgson settled on Lewis Carroll as his penname, he considered Edgar Cuthwellis.”

  “Sounds made-up.”

  “It is. It’s an anagram of his first and middle names—Charles Lutwidge. Same letters, only mixed up.”

  “Like my name is an anagram for ‘Alice.’”

  “Right. I wondered if Deanne’s name might be an anagram, too.” He held out his notebook so I could see where he’d been trying to make different words out of the letters in “Deanne Bratsch.”

  Canned Breaths

  Bathed Scanner

  A Branched Nest

  Ascendant Herb

  “Ascendant Herb?” I asked, wishing we could have this conversation inside.

  “Yeah, that didn’t make much sense. But then I realized ‘Deanne’ can be spelled with or without an e on the end, and when I dropped the second e . . .”

  He flipped to the next page. One word was written in the center of the notebook. He’d circled it twice in red.

  “Bander­snatch,” Tyrus said.

  It sounded familiar, but it wasn’t a word I knew.

  Tyrus opened his backpack and pulled out a book that made my stomach twist—not because I couldn’t read the title, but because I knew it too well. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There—the book Lewis Carroll had written after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  “It’s from a poem called ‘Jabberwocky.’” He turned a few pages in the book, barely noticing the raindrops leaving large, dark circles on the paper. More than anything else, that made me realize how upset he was.