The Water and the Wild by Katie Elise Ormsbee Read Free Book Online Page B

neither blue nor yellow, but a dull gray—just a shade deeper than her own.
    â€œDo you mind if I join you?” the boy asked, nodding toward the settee.
    â€œYes. No! I mean no, I don’t mind.” Lottie’s blush grew deeper.
    Oliver sat down cautiously on the very edge of the settee, his peculiar eyes never leaving Lottie.
    â€œAre you all right?” he asked.
    â€œI’m Lottie,” she said hurriedly, in place of an answer.
    She was busy wondering just how hideous that Quincy Francis Eugene Wilfer impression of hers had been. Mrs. Yates had taught her that first impressions were everything, and now she was afraid that this Oliver boy was going to forever think of her with crossed eyes and a flipped lower lip.
    â€œOh, I know who you are,” said Oliver. “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, and true plain hearts do in the faces rest.”
    â€œBeg your pardon?” Lottie sputtered. It sounded like the boy had switched, midsentence, into a foreign language.
    â€œIt’s poetry,” Oliver said matter-of-factly.
    Lottie did not know how to respond to
that,
so she tried another question.
    â€œWhere are we?”
    Oliver frowned and scratched his ear. “Where do you think we are?”
    â€œIn a dream,” Lottie said. “Or maybe . . . maybe I’m dead. Maybe the tree killed me after all.”
    â€œThe apple tree didn’t kill you.”
    â€œHow do you know?” said Lottie, looking up at Oliver, whose face had grown slyer.
    Rather than answer, he pointed to the row of glass doors.
    â€œIf you’d like to know where you are, why not take a look?”
    Lottie got up, and Oliver followed her to the open door. The scent of flowers grew stronger on the night air, and so did new smells of pine, of smoke, and of fresh-fallen water. She was standing on a terrace in the middle of a dim garden full of irises. Oliver pointed Lottie’s gaze to a higher point, beyond the garden. She peered into the light of the half moon, and slowly images came into focus:rows of cobblestone streets, wooden roofs, and flickers of lamplight; and towering over all of these things were trees, hundreds and hundreds of trees. Lottie had never seen so many trees in one place except in pictures from her geography textbook about places like the Black Forest and the Cascade Mountains.
    â€œIt’s nice enough,” she told Oliver, “but I still don’t know where we are.”
    â€œYou really don’t recognize it? It
is
your own backyard.”
    Lottie looked out again, then back to Oliver.
    â€œNo, it’s not. I live in New Kemble, on Kemble Isle. That”—she swept her arm out toward the lights and trees—“is not New Kemble.”
    â€œMyself unseen,” said Oliver, “I see in white defined, far off the homes of men.”
    Lottie frowned. “Was that poetry again?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWell, it didn’t make sense,” Lottie informed him. “Don’t you think I know what my own home looks like? If this is New Kemble, where is St. George’s Church? Where is the old bell tower? You can see those things from any street in New Kemble, and that’s a fact. Evenif it weren’t, there’s definitely not a whole forest growing in the middle of the city.”
    â€œWell,” Oliver said in a very rational tone of voice, “it’s not my fault that your people are worse landscapers. Or that you cut down all of
your
trees.”
    Lottie let out a squawk of exasperation. “Why are you and Adelaide talking like that?”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œWith
yours
and
ours
and
ups
and
downs
? I just want to know where I am!”
    â€œYou’re in New
Albion
,” Oliver said. “It’s your city, only in
our
world. I don’t know how else to explain it to you.”
    Lottie narrowed her eyes at the boy named Oliver. Nothing he said made sense, so of