The Scent Keeper(30)

Eliminate the variables, Emmeline.

I typed in my name. The first thing I saw was the title of a book: Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle, but it had been written hundreds of years ago. There was an image, of a woman with a stern chin and dark eyes—but she’d lived a long time ago, too, in another country.

The only thing left was the meaning of my name: work, and somehow that didn’t surprise me at all.

What else could I try? Jack? John? I typed in scent-paper, but all that gave me was something called do-it-yourself craft ideas that involved steeping paper in tea leaves and water. I tried whale bones but that became a different science lesson quickly enough.

I needed more. A clue. One good word—but I didn’t have it.



* * *



Fisher was back in school that afternoon. I was going to tell him what I’d been doing, but I realized it would be difficult without revealing what I was looking for. I wasn’t ready to risk the possibility that he would find it all too strange and no longer want to be my friend.

He was quieter than usual, and when he was taking notes I saw that he held his hand in an awkward position.

“Where were you?” I asked him as we were leaving school. “What happened to your hand?”

“Got caught in a doorjamb,” he said. “Stupid, huh?”

There was something about his voice that made me want to ask more questions, but before I could, I heard footsteps behind us.

“Hey, Miss Piggy,” Dylan said, coming up next to me. He snorted and pawed the toe of his shoe in the ground.

“Stop it,” Fisher said, his voice tight.

Dylan tugged on one of my curls. “They even look like pig’s tails.”

I didn’t move.

“Want to smell my shit, Piggy?” Dylan said, tugging again, harder.

“Don’t touch her.” Fisher’s words were so hot that the air around them seemed to smoke.

“Whoa,” Dylan said, stepping back.

“Just leave her the fuck alone. All of you.”



* * *



Whatever had come over Fisher retreated quickly, and while it scared me, at least no one touched me after that—not physically, anyway. Nothing could stop the snorts and snuffles and whispers, however. I was too tempting a target, even with Fisher nearby.

The rumors didn’t stop, either; they just changed. My father had been a disgraced politician. He was an escaped murderer with a thing for children. I was a kidnap victim, a clone he was protecting from evil government researchers, a changeling.

The kids threw the rumors out like lit matches, to see what would catch. I stayed silent, listening to the fizz and spark of their words, pretending I was water, putting them out.





IN THE WOODS


Colette took a shine to Fisher. That’s what she called it—taking a shine. It made sense; I’d seen the way she rubbed her one silver vase until the dark smudges left and the bright came through. She was like that with Fisher, too.

“You live near us, don’t you?” she’d said the first time they met, as she was picking me up after school. Before the term began, there had been talk of my taking the bus, but she was still there, every day. It was yet another thing for the kids to tease me about, but I didn’t care. That truck, and Colette inside it, meant safety at the end of the day, and I was grateful for it.

“Yes, ma’am,” Fisher said. “My dad keeps his fishing boat in your cove.”

Colette looked at him more closely. “Is your dad Frank?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. Martin.”

“Oh,” she said, her eyebrows rising slightly. She put the key in the ignition and then turned back to him. “Would you like a ride to our place, Fisher?” she asked. His nod was accompanied by a smile.

After that, he came home with us almost every afternoon, and I noticed Colette baking more than usual. Cardamom rolls. Oatmeal cookies. A spice cake, as fall settled heavily around us, pressing the flowers back into the ground with sheets of rain.

“I’m just trying out recipes for next summer’s guests,” she said.



* * *



It felt good, sitting around our kitchen table with Dodge at my feet, doing homework with Fisher while the smells of vanilla and butter made everything soft. As we moved deeper into autumn, however, I could feel myself starting to tighten. I watched Henry and Colette and Fisher for those signs of disappearance I always saw in my father when winter came. The rolling into oneself, the quieting. But all I saw in Colette’s kitchen was more cookies, and Fisher, whose face was slowly but surely opening up.

He helped me with history; I helped him with science. He taught me how to write a paper; I told him stories from my father’s books. Whatever had held Fisher back in school, it clearly wasn’t his brain. For my part, I caught up with the other kids in class. I still never raised my hand or answered a question, but I was passing my tests, which narrowed my problems down to the other students.

There were times—like when a kid would pass by me, pulling up the front of her nose to make it look like a pig’s snout, or when another one started an answer in history class with a casually innocent once upon a time—that I hated my father for what he’d made me. A freak. The girl who lived through her nose. I’d loved our island, believed in the wonder of its smells and bottles. But I had come to understand that my father had created that world—and now I fit nowhere else.