Demerits: 6
Conversations with Steffi: 9
Game suspensions: 1
Public service hours: 19
Hours spent enduring Fiorenze
Stupid- Name’s company: 4.75
Number of Steffi kisses: 2
Days Steffi not talking to me: 2
Parking spots for Danders Anders: 16
Vows to kill Danders Anders: 31
I put the heavy pile of papers on the floor in front of me and turned the contents page over, carefully placing it on the floor on top of the title page. “Introductory Notes,” it read. I wondered if it would be safe to skip it and glanced at Fiorenze, who was frowning, but seemed to be reading every single word.
The first few pages referred to gazillions of other books on fairies, quoting from them and then (mostly) disagreeing with them. The other weird thing was that she kept referring to other things she’d written and calling herself “Burnham-Stone.” Strange. Especially when she started disagreeing with herself.
Like she said that despite Burnham-Stone’s argument that “if one’s belief system did not encompass the existence of fairies, said fairies would generally be less productive than they were for those whose belief systems were more accommodating,” there was plenty of evidence that “fairy productivity had no correlation with the host’s belief systems,” which I figured meant that she used to think you had to believe in fairies for them to work but now she didn’t. That explained Steffi and his fairy.
Then I realized that the first Burnham-Stone had the initial “W” and the second one the initial “T.” She wasn’t disagreeing with herself. She was disagreeing with her husband.
I also found it creepy that she used the word “host” to refer to the person who had the fairy. Did that mean fairies were like parasites?
One section worried about whether getting rid of your fairy and getting a new one was ethical. There were lots of quotes from various experts on how you were probably meant to have whatever fairy you wound up with and if everyone changed their fairies it could lead to all sorts of terrible consequences. There were no quotes saying what those consequences were. Obviously none of these experts had ever been stuck with a parking fairy.
She also said that there was no evidence to support the theory that fairies were attracted to “good” people and repelled by “bad” people—“the behaviors of hosts appear to have no effect on their fairies whatsoever.” I couldn’t wait to tell Rochelle.
The pages were littered with tons of impossible- to-read footnotes. All of it scrawled in her not- the- most- legible-in- the- world handwriting. While there weren’t as many crossing outs as on the contents page, there were still many.
I skipped to the first proper section,“Thwarting.”
It was exactly what I thought: don’t do any of the things that are remotely within your fairy’s bailiwick. Thwart the fairy! Only it took Burnham-Stone twenty pages to say so on account of having to list example after example after example and quote everyone who’d ever written about fairies ever. Vastly boring! She concluded by saying that while it was one of the most effective fairy removal methods, it was by far the slowest.
I could vouch for that! It took Burnham-Stone four months to get rid of her loose-change fairy. Though she wrote about one case that took two years. I shuddered at the thought of it.
Starving fairies turned out to be the vegetarian option. Sort of. Only it wasn’t all vegetables, just carrots. According to Burnham-Stone, if you stuck to that diet, after two weeks your fairy would be long gone. When she used it to get rid of her good- hair fairy it was gone in twelve days.
She didn’t mention how that left her. Twelve days of nothing but carrots? Wouldn’t you be gone too? And according to her you could drink only water; anything else delayed the fairy disappearing, or stopped it from working altogether.
In her conclusion Burnham-Stone noted that the diet was dangerous and should not be continued for more than three weeks. On the other hand, the starvation method was as successful as the thwarting method, just quicker.
For me and Fiorenze it was out of the question. Although carrots were one of the few vegetables I liked, all our food was measured and weighed. If we were consuming that few calories a day with so little good fat or minerals or vitamins or protein, we’d be reported to the doctors before the end of the day.
“You got anything yet, Fio?”
She shook her head. “Impossible or too dangerous so far. Though the section I’m reading now is a possibility. Bleaching. You have to lie in a bath of bleach. The trick is to get the bleach to water ratio exactly right. Plus you have to keep it out of all your bits that will sting.”
“Hmm.” That didn’t sound like much fun.
“If you get it right the fairy goes away instantly.”
“What happens if you get it wrong?”
“You wind up with third-degree burns, or go blind, or damage your hearing. Or all three. Oh.”
“What?” The expression on her face was dire.
“If you really frag it up you die.”
“What larks,” I said. “I guess if nothing else works we could try that. But we’re not that desperate yet, are we?” I felt desperate.
“Not yet.” Fiorenze smiled. “Moving along.”
My next one was light deprivation. Two weeks of total darkness? It was about as possible as the nothing- but carrots method. I could only attempt it during the holidays and even then I couldn’t see my parents agreeing. And Burnham- Stone’s list of “contraindications,” which included depression and suicide, was not encouraging. On the other hand, at the end of it her cat fairy was gone.
The dirt option was the one Bluey had recommended, only he’d said six weeks and Tamsin said four. You weren’t allowed to wash your teeth, your hair, your clothes, your anything. We’d be expelled by the end of the second day if we tried it. I wondered how bad you’d smell after four weeks. Vastly bad, I decided.
The next one was completely out of the question. “Near dying” turned out to be exactly that. Burnham-Stone had noticed some people who’d almost died had lost their fairies. At first she’d thought this was the velocity effect. I tried to read the footnote to figure out what the velocity effect was, and failed on account of the teeniness and multiple- crossed- outedness of her writing, but it seemed to be the idea that if you go really, really, really fast your fairy falls off. She discounted it because there were lots of professional skydivers and race car drivers with fairies.
She also said you didn’t have to actually nearly die. It wasn’t about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but about whether your fairy thought you were in immediate danger of sudden death. So people who’d been held up in an armed robbery had lost their fairies, as had some amateurs skydiving, and people in car accidents who otherwise had been completely unharmed.
If the fairy thought you were about to die imminently, even if you weren’t, it jumped ship.
She’d been unable to find a single example of someone with a fatal illness losing their fairy before they died. The fairy didn’t jump on diagnosis. People who were deathly ill kept their fairies until they died.
“So, Fio? It says here that if we jump off a building and survive, our fairies will disappear. Apparently they run away if they think you’re going to die.”
“Um, yay? But wouldn’t we actually die?”
“Not if we had a trampoline or something to land on.” Even to me it sounded like an injured suggestion.
“I prefer bleaching.”
It was almost four in the morning and I hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep in months and months. I yawned, rubbed my eyes, and tried to focus on the pages in front of me. Why did Burnham-Stone give so many examples? Why did she have to quote so many people, including herself? Why couldn’t she get to the point? Her book would have been half the size if she hadn’t droned on and on.
Fiorenze yelped.
I startled and scattered pages. “Gah!”
Fiorenze looked up at me, all tiredness gone. “I think I’ve got it!”
“Really?” My heart beat faster.
“Yes! And it’s not that dangerous, plus we can do it to night—”
“This morning.”
“We can do it right now,” Fiorenze said, grinning. “But you might not like it.”
“I thought you said it’s not dangerous? It’s got to be better than bleaching, right? Or dying. It doesn’t turn you orange, does it?”
“Orange? No. But it’s a bit bloody.”
“Tell me.” Did we have to cut our little toes off and eat them? Drink blood? Bathe in it? Though where would we get enough blood to have a bath in at this time of night? “How bloody, Fio?”
“We cut our thumbs. Doesn’t have to be too deep or anything, but there has to be blood. Also we have to have salt in our mouths when we do it, and it has to be in the dark.”
“Well that doesn’t sound too bad. If we’re careful and don’t take out our own eyes we should be fine.”
“And . . .”
“And?”
“Well, it won’t disappear our fairies exactly.”
“How do you mean?”
“We do it together. We swap.”
“Swap?” I asked. “What do you mean, swap?”
“Swap our fairies. I’ll have your parking fairy and you’ll have my boy fairy.”
“That’s possible? I never heard of that happening. Are you sure?”
Fiorenze nodded. “I don’t know if it’ll work or not. But Tamsin says that it worked for her. She and Waverly swapped fairies. Do you believe that? I didn’t even know. He got her fairy, she got his. That’s how she got her current OCD fairy.”
“So you’d get my parking fairy,” I asked, thinking that sounded very doos indeed. “And I’ll have—”
“I’ll have all your problems and you’ll have mine.”
“Why haven’t we ever heard of that before?”
“I don’t know. But according to Tamsin it not only works, it takes about ten minutes.”
Just ten minutes away from having no parking fairy and having Fiorenze’s boy fairy instead? The one that made Steffi like her? “Are you sure you want to do that?” I asked. “My problems are vastly malodorous.”
“Not as malodorous as mine,” Fiorenze said. “Truly, Charlie, my fairy is the worst fairy in existence. You’re getting the bad end of this deal. We can keep searching through Tamsin’s book if you like.”
Was she mad? Nothing could be worse than being Danders Anders’s parking slave. Nothing.
“You really don’t have to swap.”
“Yes, I do. I can’t stand having a parking fairy for another single day. Let’s do it!”