Kelly Link - Magic for Beginners

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FOX IS A TELEVISION CHARACTER, and she isn't dead yet. But she will be, soon. She's a

character on a television show called The Library. You've never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you

wish you had.

In one episode of The Library, a boy named Jeremy Mars, fifteen years old, sits on the roof of his

house in Plantagenet, Vermont. It's eight o'clock at night, a school night, and he and his friend Elizabeth

should be studying for the math quiz that their teacher, Mr. Cliff, has been hinting at all week long.

Instead they've sneaked out onto the roof. It's cold. They don't know everything they should know about

X, when X is the square root of Y. They don't even know Y. They ought to go in.

But there's nothing good on TV and the sky is very beautiful. They have jackets on, and up in the

corners where the sky begins are patches of white in the darkness, still, where there's snow, up on the

mountains. Down in the trees around the house, some animal is making a small, anxious sound: "Why

cry? Why cry?"

"What's that one?" Elizabeth says, pointing at a squarish configuration of stars.

"That's The Parking Structure," Jeremy says. "And right next to that is The Big Shopping Mall and The

Lesser Shopping Mall."

"And that's Orion, right? Orion the Bargain Hunter?"

Jeremy squints up. "No, Orion is over there. That's The Austrian Bodybuilder. That thing that's sort of

wrapped around his lower leg is The Amorous Cephalopod. The Hungry, Hungry Octopus. It can't make

up its mind whether it should eat him or make crazy, eight-legged love to him. You know that myth,

right?"

"Of course," Elizabeth says. "Is Karl going to be pissed off that we didn't invite him over to study?"

"Karl's always pissed off about something," Jeremy says. Jeremy is resolutely resisting a notion about

Elizabeth. Why are they sitting up here? Was it his idea or was it hers? Are they friends, are they just two

friends sitting on the roof and talking? Or is Jeremy supposed to try to kiss her? He thinks maybe he's

supposed to kiss her. If he kisses her, will they still be friends? He can't ask Karl about this. Karl doesn't

believe in being helpful. Karl believes in mocking.

Jeremy doesn't even know if he wants to kiss Elizabeth. He's never thought about it until right now.

"I should go home," Elizabeth says. "There could be a new episode on right now, and we wouldn't

even know."

"Someone would call and tell us," Jeremy says. "My mom would come up and yell for us." His mother

is something else Jeremy doesn't want to worry about, but he does, he does.

Jeremy Mars knows a lot about the planet Mars, although he's never been there. He knows some

girls, and yet he doesn't know much about them. He wishes there were books about girls, the way there

are books about Mars, that you could observe the orbits and brightness of girls through telescopes

without appearing to be perverted. Once Jeremy read a book about Mars out loud to Karl, except he

kept replacing the word Mars with the word "girls." Karl cracked up every time.

Jeremy's mother is a librarian. His father writes books. Jeremy reads biographies. He plays trombone

in a marching band. He jumps hurdles while wearing a school tracksuit. Jeremy is also passionately

addicted to a television show in which a renegade librarian and magician named Fox is trying to save her

world from thieves, murderers, cabalists, and pirates. Jeremy is a geek, although he's a telegenic geek.

Somebody should make a TV show about him.

Jeremy's friends call him Germ, although he would rather be called Mars. His parents haven't spoken

to each other in a week.

Jeremy doesn't kiss Elizabeth. The stars don't fall out of the sky, and Jeremy and Elizabeth don't fall off

the roof either. They go inside and finish their homework.

Someone who Jeremy has never met, never even heard of — a woman named Cleo Baldrick — has

died. Lots of people, so far, have managed to live and die without making the acquaintance of Jeremy

Mars, but Cleo Baldrick has left Jeremy Mars and his mother something strange in her will: a phone

booth on a state highway, some forty miles outside of Las Vegas, and a Las Vegas wedding chapel. The

wedding chapel is called Hell's Bells. Jeremy isn't sure what kind of people get married there. Bikers,

maybe. Supervillains, freaks, and Satanists.

Jeremy's mother wants to tell him something. It's probably something about Las Vegas and about Cleo

Baldrick, who — it turns out — was his mother's great-aunt. (Jeremy never knew his mother had a

great-aunt. His mother is a mysterious person.) But it may be, on the other hand, something concerning

Jeremy's father. For a week and a half now, Jeremy has managed to avoid finding out what his mother is

worrying about. It's easy not to find out things, if you try hard enough. There's band practice. He has

overslept on weekdays in order to rule out conversations at breakfast, and at night he climbs up on the

roof with his telescope to look at stars, to look at Mars. His mother is afraid of heights. She grew up in

L.A.

It's clear that whatever it is she has to tell Jeremy is not something she wants to tell him. As long as he

avoids being alone with her, he's safe.

But it's hard to keep your guard up at all times. Jeremy comes home from school, feeling as if he has

passed the math test after all. Jeremy is an optimist. Maybe there's something good on TV. He settles

down with the remote control on one of his father's pet couches: oversized and re-upholstered in an

orange-juice-colored corduroy that makes it appear as if the couch has just escaped from a maximum

security prison for criminally insane furniture. This couch looks as if its hobby is devouring interior

decorators. Jeremy's father is a horror writer, so no one should be surprised if some of the couches he

reupholsters are hideous and eldritch.

Jeremy's mother comes into the room and stands above the couch, looking down at him. "Germ?" she

says. She looks absolutely miserable, which is more or less how she has looked all week.

The phone rings and Jeremy jumps up.

As soon as he hears Elizabeth's voice, he knows. She says, "Germ, it's on. Channel forty-two. I'm

taping it." She hangs up.

"It's on!" Jeremy says. "Channel forty-two! Now!"

His mother has the television on by the time he sits down. Being a librarian, she has a particular

fondness for The Library. "I should go tell your dad," she says, but instead she sits down beside Jeremy.

And of course it's now all the more clear something is wrong between Jeremy's parents. But The Library

is on and Fox is about to rescue Prince Wing.

When the episode ends, he can tell without looking over that his mother is crying. "Don't mind me," she

says and wipes her nose on her sleeve. "Do you think she's really dead?"

But Jeremy can't stay around and talk.

Jeremy has wondered about what kind of television shows the characters in television shows watch.

Television characters almost always have better haircuts, funnier friends, simpler attitudes toward sex.

They marry magicians, win lotteries, have affairs with women who carry guns in their purses. Curious

things happen to them on an hourly basis. Jeremy and I can forgive their haircuts. We just want to ask

them about their television shows.

Just like always, it's Elizabeth who worked out in the nick of time that the new episode was on.

Everyone will show up at Elizabeth's house afterward, for the postmortem. This time, it really is a

postmortem. Why did Prince Wing kill Fox? How could Fox let him do it? Fox is ten times stronger.

Jeremy runs all the way, slapping his old track shoes against the sidewalk for the pleasure of the jar,

for the sweetness of the sting. He likes the rough, cottony ache in his lungs. His coach says you have to

be part-masochist to enjoy something like running. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's something to

exploit.

Talis opens the door. She grins at him, although he can tell that she's been crying, too. She's wearing a

T-shirt that says I'm So Goth I Shit Tiny Vampires.

"Hey," Jeremy says. Talis nods. Talis isn't so Goth, at least not as far as Jeremy or anyone else knows.

Talis just has a lot of T-shirts. She's an enigma wrapped in a mysterious T-shirt. A woman once said to

Calvin Coolidge, "Mr. President, I bet my husband that I could get you to say more than two words."

Coolidge said, "You lose." Jeremy can imagine Talis as Calvin Coolidge in a former life. Or maybe she

was one of those dogs that don't bark. A basenji. Or a rock. A dolmen. There was an episode of The

Library, once, with some sinister dancing dolmens in it.

Elizabeth comes up behind Talis. If Talis is unGoth, then Elizabeth is Ballerina Goth. She likes hearts

and skulls and black pen-ink tattoos, pink tulle, and Hello Kitty. When the woman who invented Hello

Kitty was asked why Hello Kitty was so popular, she said, "Because she has no mouth." Elizabeth's

mouth is small. Her lips are chapped.

"That was the most horrible episode ever! I cried and cried," she says. "Hey, Germ, so I was telling

Talis about how you inherited a gas station."

"A phone booth," Jeremy says. "In Las Vegas. This great-great-aunt died. And there's a wedding

chapel, too."

"Hey! Germ!" Karl says, yelling from the living room. "Shut up and get in here! The commercial with

the talking cats is on — "

"Shut it, Karl," Jeremy says. He goes in and sits on Karl's head. You have to show Karl who's boss

once in a while.

Amy turns up last. She was in the next town over, buying comics. She hasn't seen the new episode and

so they all shut it (except for Talis, who has not been saying anything at all) and Elizabeth puts on the

tape.

In the previous episode of The Library, masked pirate-magicians said they would sell Prince Wing a

cure for the spell that infested Faithful Margaret's hair with miniature, wicked, fire-breathing golems.

(Faithful Margaret's hair keeps catching fire, but she refuses to shave it off. Her hair is the source of all

her magic.)

The pirate-magicians lured Prince Wing into a trap so obvious that it seemed impossible it could really

be a trap, on the one-hundred-and-fortieth floor of The Free People's World-Tree Library. The

pirate-magicians used finger magic to turn Prince Wing into a porcelain teapot, put two Earl Grey tea

bags into the teapot, and poured in boiling water, toasted the Eternally Postponed and Overdue Reign of

the Forbidden Books, drained their tea in one gulp, belched, hurled their souvenir pirate mugs to the

ground, and then shattered the teapot, which had been Prince Wing, into hundreds of pieces. Then the

wicked pirate-magicians swept the pieces of both Prince Wing and collectable mugs carelessly into a

wooden cigar box, buried the box in the Angela Carter Memorial Park on the seventeenth floor of The

World-Tree Library, and erected a statue of George Washington above it.

So then Fox had to go looking for Prince Wing. When she finally discovered the park on the

seventeenth floor of the Library, the George Washington statue stepped down off his plinth and fought

her tooth and nail. Literally tooth and nail, and they'd all agreed that there was something especially

nightmarish about a biting, scratching, life-sized statue of George Washington with long, pointed metal

fangs that threw off sparks when he gnashed them. The statue of George Washington bit Fox's pinky

finger right off, just like Gollum biting Frodo's finger off on the top of Mount Doom. But of course, once

the statue tasted Fox's magical blood, it fell in love with Fox. It would be her ally from now on.

In the new episode, the actor playing Fox is a young Latina actress whom Jeremy Mars thinks he

recognizes. She has been a snotty but well-intentioned fourth-floor librarian in an episode about an

epidemic of food-poisoning that triggered bouts of invisibility and/or levitation, and she was also a

lovelorn, suicidal Bear Cult priestess in the episode where Prince Wing discovered his mother was one of

the Forbidden Books.

This is one of the best things about The Library, the way the cast swaps parts, all except for Faithful

Margaret and Prince Wing, who are only ever themselves. Faithful Margaret and Prince Wing are the

love interests and the main characters, and therefore, inevitably, the most boring characters, although

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Kelly Link - Magic for Beginners

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