Between the lines

“Seraphima,” I speak, my voice an echo of Delilah’s, “everyone deserves a happy ending. Will you be mine?”

Hearing the sentence, I wonder why I didn’t think of it as a password.

“Oh, Oliver,” Seraphima replies. “Do you even have to ask?”

I may be the only one who notices the slight tremor in her voice. Could it be, finally, that she realizes there’s more to us than just the story?

This is the part where she launches herself into my arms and slobbers all over me. I get the sense that perhaps for the first time, neither one of us wants to play the parts we must. I close my eyes and stiffen my spine, bracing myself for what’s to come, but instead, I feel a magnetic pull on my foot, tugging me backward, as if I have absolutely no choice but to take a step away from Seraphima.

“Oliver,” Delilah says aloud as she types, “suddenly wrenches away from his would-be bride.” She glances over her shoulder at me. “How’s that?” she asks.

My mouth fills with the sharp edges of words that poke into my tongue and force me to spit them out. “I can’t marry you,” I say, hearing Delilah speak the same sentence simultaneously. “I’m being sent to start my own story, in a different world, with Delilah Eve McPhee.”

Seraphima blinks at me, her eyes bugging out. She looks hopeful, and scared, and confused, but she knows better than to question the plot when the book is wide open and there’s a Reader involved. I can see, from the corner of my eye, everyone else shifting uncomfortably. After all, this isn’t the fairy tale they know.

There is a tingle in my right hand. At first I think Seraphima has succeeded in cutting off my circulation, but then I realize my flesh is fading, flickering in and out like a flame, until in an instant, it’s gone.

“Your arm!” Seraphima gasps, breaking the rules. Or so I think, until I realize that Delilah has said it too. I glance out of the book and see a disembodied wrist and hand floating in the space between Edgar and Delilah.

“I think it’s working,” Edgar whispers.

I’m feeling light-headed, and finding it hard to breathe. When I look down, there is a quivering in the fabric of my tunic, and suddenly, it begins to unravel and vanish before my eyes.

“Oliver,” Delilah says, “your tunic. It’s weaving itself together in front of us!”

My heart is pounding so hard I am certain that everyone on the beach can hear it, and possibly Delilah and Edgar too. Could this really be working? Could I be this close to being free?

I look at Frump, who stares at me with a mix of betrayal and fear on his furry little face. I can’t speak to him-I haven’t been given the words-but I silently mouth a message. Goodbye, friend. I close my eyes, and hope for the best.

“Edgar?” An unfamiliar voice floats over the beach. “What are you two reading?”

My world reels and then rights itself. Delilah’s grabbed the book and has propped me against the computer screen. Now I can still peer into the room, but my perspective is from a different angle. Edgar has stepped forward so that the translucent phantom limbs that are knitting themselves together again are blocked by his own body-so that as Jessamyn Jacobs enters, she cannot see what’s happening.

“That old fairy tale,” Edgar says, his voice too high. How can she not guess that he’s lying? “I forgot how it ends.”

“Happily ever after, of course,” Jessamyn says.

“Right.” Delilah smiles brightly. “Of course.”

All of sudden, I can feel the blood rushing back to my chest and my arm. It’s like they are on fire, like I am about to burst out of my skin. Groaning, I fall to my knees on the sand, crippled by pain.

“I just came to say good night. Delilah, do you need anything?”

“I’m fine…” She smiles. “Thanks. For everything.”

Although I am kneeling now, I feel myself being dragged closer to Seraphima again. Yanked upward by some kind of reverse, perverse antigravity. My hand smacks against hers, glues itself tight in a clasp.

I know what’s happening. Just like every other attempt to release me from the book, this one has failed. The story always wins.

Jessamyn comes closer, another Reader. I watch her peer down at the page. “I used to love this final scene…”

Edgar grabs the book, making my head spin. “Whatever,” he says, and he slams the cover shut, so that I collapse to the ground.

There is an immediate buzz as the other characters discuss the odd incident that has just unfolded before their eyes. Seraphima bursts into tears, covers her face with her hands, and runs off the beach. Orville rushes toward me, feeling the length of my arm. “My boy,” he says, “what sort of black magic was that?”

“I’m fine,” I tell him, and then I address the others. “It was a freak accident or something. Everything’s back to normal.”

At my reassurance, the little group begins to disband, still talking about what they’ve witnessed. Only Frump remains, sitting beside me. “Ollie,” he says, “we’ve been friends too long for you to lie to me.”

I scuff my boot in the sand. This is how it all began, with a chessboard we’d drawn between us. “I want out, Frump,” I admit. “I don’t belong here any more than you belong in the body of a hound.”

“But that’s not for us to decide,” Frump says.

“How come I’m the only one who gets the happy ending?” I say. “Didn’t that ever seem wrong to you?”

“I guess I just assumed you were the lucky one.”

“We could all be lucky,” I say. “We could all be who we want to be, instead of who someone else told us to be.”

Frump shakes his head. “You’re making things up, Ollie.”

“Isn’t that how we all got here in the first place?” I say gently.

Frump’s eyes light up as he imagines the possibility of a future different from the one he expected. And then he remembers what happened to me minutes ago. “You were trying to leave,” he states slowly, understanding.

“Yes. I can’t stay here.”

Frump sits a little taller. “Then I’ll go with you.”

I nod my chin toward the distance, where Seraphima is sitting on a rock near the edge of the sea, still delicately wiping away her tears. “That’s not really what you want, is it?” I smile faintly at him. “If I get out of here, you have my word: I will do everything in my power to make sure you’re a human again.”

He scratches behind his ear, lost in thought. “Ollie? Could I ask you for something else? If you do get out of here… could you make… her… notice me?”

“I think she already has,” I say, elbowing him gently. “Go on.”

He shuffles down the beach to the rock where Seraphima is sitting. Absently, the princess begins to pat him on the head. Frump glances back at me, just once, his tail wagging.

I raise my right arm, a wave goodbye. My right arm, which is just where it always has been and always will be-drawn attached to me, on a page I may never escape.

Delilah

THE MINUTE HIS MOTHER LEAVES, EDGAR turns to me. “This,” he says, wide-eyed, “is wicked awesome!”

I immediately sit down at the computer, furiously typing THE NEW END to the altered fairy tale that will allow Oliver out of the story-but the cursor leaps upward and begins to erase the words I’ve already written. The word NEW is the last to go, leaving THE END just the way it used to be.

“No.” I gasp, and I turn around to confirm my suspicions: Oliver’s body, which has been gradually appearing before our eyes, has vanished.

“Where did he go?” Edgar asks, looking underneath the bed and in the closet.

I don’t know why I can’t make the simple changes on the computer. Maybe it’s a strange firewall the author