Another day, he hands her a wet rag while she is in the back yard throwing rotten mangoes at a big tree in the gully and watching them smash. “Wash your hands. I know you can read. Try reading this.”
“No!” She throws The Wizard of Oz on the ground as he walks away.
Irritated that this does not bother him, she picks it up, wipes mango goo from the cover, and reads aloud to the gully in a shouting voice: “When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at. “
She turns and faces the house, where Jack might still be listening. She hopes he is. “So? I am an orphan. I scream a lot. AIEEEE! And sometimes I hate it when people laugh!”
The trees swish in the wind, and the palms make rain-pattering sounds beneath the blue sky.
She does nothing for three days except read The Wizard of Oz. When she is finished, she marches into Jack’s room, where he is studying, and smacks it down on his desk.
“I am very angry with you,” she shouts.
“Why?”
“Because this made me sad and afraid and worried.” “Anything else?”
“I was happy and sad at the same time when Dorothy got back home. I hated it!” “Why?”
“I just did!”
Jack smiles as she stomps from the room. Next, he gives her a curious old volume, My Bookhouse: Through Fairy Halls. It is a hefty book, bound in black leather, with vivid pictures that seem like music, because of the way they move in Pele’s mind. It smells funny. The pages are dry. “Take care of it,” he says.
Pele is walking on a treadmill. A girl stands next to her, watching.
“Are you Bean?”
“That’s the first time you remembered.”
“I told you a story.”
The girl looks straight at Pele. Her eyes are hazel with flecks of gold. “A girl lived in the mountains of Tibet. She was trying to escape from the Chinese and broke her leg and nearly starved to death.” Bean purses her lips, looking confused. “You said I couldn’t give her any powers, and I couldn’t earn any weapons, so I couldn’t help her. Things just happened and then it was over and nobody won, but she did get out and became a hero. You said it would change my brain. I tried to measure that, but I couldn’t. I think I need more stories to do that, or I have to figure out a new way of measuring.”
“Usually when I was your age I liked a story if it made me cry.”
Bean flashes her a startled look. “You liked to cry?”
Pele smiles. “It is kind of strange, isn’t it?”
Bean frowns. “I will tell you my story. It is about a horse. I don’t know if you would like it. It doesn’t have an ending.”
“I think I know your story. But there are many ways to tell every story. Tell it to me again. I’m sure that it will make me cry.”
As Pele strides back into trance, into dream, Bean wonders why tears flow from beneath Pele’s closed eyelids.
“Pele!”
Ta’a’aeva stands in front of her. Bean leans close, against her left arm. They are all gathered, all looking at her.
Ta’a’aeva speaks. “We need your help. It is almost completed, we think. But you are the one who can do it. We are glad you have come. But be here! Please wake up!”
Obviously, a dream.
Pele, in her own little house, a chicken coop in a row of chicken coops long ago completely sanitized, used, and abandoned by various Hsu children.
Hers has weather-smoothed streaks of white paint, abundant sun that lies on the floor in a slant, a shelf where hens once roosted crowded with a row of old books. Large, castoff cushions on the floor.
She is seven.
Her brothers and sisters rush down the gully, a crescendoing cavalcade of pounding feet. They surround her house, yelling. Rocks bounce off the side. Diane peers in the window, howls with laughter. “She’s reading those silly fairy tales again!”
“Yeah, she likes those old books. I loaned her my screen and found it in the trash can!”
They leap around the chicken coop, yelling, singing, beating on it with sticks, making it shake when they try to push it over.
Pele, lying on her stomach, barely hears them. She is in worlds of ogres, fairies, magic boots, menehunies, stupid children, endless journeys, flying carpets, talking animals, and powerful goddesses like her namesake, a dangerous woman whose actions are unpredictable and thrilling, who created the Hawaiian Islands with her volcanoes. They are more real than people, and certainly much more interesting.
She does not even notice when the clatter recedes. Rain patters on big-leaved trees, sun speeds across the floor, she smells sweetly rotting mangoes mixed in the brisk, whipping breeze, and reads.
Sunny’s sideways head and shoulders darken the coop’s small door. “It’s getting dark. Come inside.”
Pele, her head propped on her elbows, is reading about a giant. “No.”
Sunny smiles, sets a water bottle, a package of dried squid, and a book light inside, then leaves.
When Pele wakes the next morning in her own bed, she has a memory of being carried through the night, and the stars. Next to her on the bed is Through Fairy Halls, her favorite of the Bookhouse volumes. She opens it and starts to read. Grimm, Anderson, the Blue and Green and Red books follow, and then folk and fairy tales from around the world. Wise and wily rabbits, lions, crickets and tortoises argue, beguile, win, lose. And Fairyland itself?
Oh, there is music and dancing in Fairyland. No yesterday, and no tomorrow. Pipes call. Trumpets sound. The low are made high, and the high are surprised and chagrined.
There is a dangerous edge to Fairyland, which Pele enjoys.
